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If you care about food, you must read Elizabeth David. Author of nine definitive books, including
Italian Food and
French Provincial Cooking, her writings famously helped reawaken the postwar British palate while educating, through authentic recipes and compelling investigation, a generation of cooks about food and its joys.
Is There a Nutmeg in the House?--a second posthumous anthology (David died in 1992)--contains previously uncollected essays, journalism, and correspondence, plus 150 recipes, all of which reveal the author at her wonderfully informative best. Readers will delight in her opinionated yet embracing sensibility, her unerring sense of what makes food not only good but genuine--true to itself and the people who make it.
The book is divided into course-based chapters that net David's wide-ranging essays and recipes. The essays explore, among other topics, the story of bouillon cubes; the virtues of nutmeg; the uselessness of garlic presses; the nature of the ideal kitchen (keep refrigerators far away from stoves, she advises); and the best way to poach an egg (David quotes an historical source on the subject, with whom she agrees that if the eggs aren't fresh, "it is not in the power of the best cook in the Kingdom to poach [them] handsome"). The recipes run the gamut from a brilliant pizza quartet (Roman, Provençal, Armenian, and Genovese variations) to Beans in the Tuscan Bean Jar (a flasklike container that ensures even cooking) to ice creams and other tempting desserts like the Victorian Lemon and Brown Sugar Cake. With woodcuts and other illustration, the book is a treasure. --Arthur Boehm
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
An Englishwoman who traipsed through Africa and the Mediterranean countries in the early 1940s, David (1913-1992) opened up a world of flavors and techniques that must have seemed seductively exotic to a postwar Great Britain still struggling with food rationing. She was perhaps best known for French Provincial Cooking, but was also the author of food essays in such publications as Vogue, the London Sunday Times and Gourmet, some of which were eventually published in the highly regarded collection An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. This volume is a compilation of essays and recipes that didn't make it into the first, chosen by editor and longtime associate Jill Norman. The title essay succinctly sums up David's demand for cultural and gastronomic accuracy in cooking, as well as shows off her exacting writing. In it she bemoans the passing of the 18th-century tradition of carrying one's own nutmeg box and grater. She asserts that in fine London restaurants, she must ask for nutmeg to grate on her pasta and spinach dishes, a spice she considers as integral to Italian cooking as "Parmesan cheese and oregano and for that matter salt." A labor of love, the result is yet another evocative and entertaining exploration of cooking and the time, place and personalities that shaped it.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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